Setting and achieving your goals: the Google way

Every human being has goals, it’s simply in our DNA. There’s always an objective, something we’re aiming to do or acquire. Our shorter-term goals tend to be very automatic and subconscious. Things like needing to eat, get dressed, or put on our shoes are all embedded into our routines, but they’re still goals that our brain automatically sets out to achieve. Since they’re so short term, they’re not very challenging to achieve which is why they can be done so automatically and in a routine.

Long term goals are a different challenge. These are things we plan for in the future because we know they take time to achieve and often aren’t so simplistic. We can often see and define our goal i.e “the target” quite clearly in our mind; for example: I want to sign on 10 new clients for my business this quarter or I want to get to 10,000 followers on Medium by the end of this month. You imagine how great it would be to achieve those goals!

But, the path to get there is often less clear. What’s the first step towards achieving your goal? The second step? How long will it take? I’m super busy so how should I use my time to get the best bang for buck out of the things I do? How do I track my progress? These are a few of the many questions that we might ask ourselves when we set our goals.

Whenever we have such unanswered questions about anything, it’s often a good idea to look at what other people have done to answer them. If you want to become a pro basketball player, your best bet for getting advice would be to talk to someone in the NBA. If you want to become a software engineer, you’ll learn a lot from asking a software engineer some curious questions about their profession. With goal setting, we have a chance to learn from the best of the best about how to do it right: Google. Google is obviously a hugely successful company and their ability to set big targets and then meet those targets is no doubt critical to their success.

Google uses a goal setting system called OKR: Objectives and Key Results for defining goals, tracking progress, and reviewing their outcomes to improve on the next time around! The OKR framework was created by former Intel CEO Andy Grove and brought to Google; since then, it’s been used by several companies including Google, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Uber.

Let’s start by taking a look at the key components of OKRs and then dive deeper into how we can practically use this framework:

• With OKRs, we set objectives to achieve within a fixed time frame and key results which act as indicators and metrics of our success in achieving those objectives
• Objectives should be ambitious and may feel somewhat uncomfortable. You should aim for something a bit beyond what you see as achievable in the given time frame
• Your key results are measurable and should be easy to grade with a number (Google uses a scale of 0–1.0)
• The “sweet spot” for an OKR grade is 60% — 70%; if someone consistently fully attains their objectives, their OKRs aren’t ambitious enough and they need to think bigger.
• Low grades should be viewed as data to help refine the next OKRs.

In practice, using OKRs is different from other goal-setting techniques because of the aim to set very ambitious goals. When used this way, OKRs can enable us to focus more on the things that will get us the most bang for buck, since we don’t really have time to look at the little things with such an ambitious goals. By focusing on the most important things, you’ll be able to accomplish more than you originally thought was possible. In a nutshell, OKRs help you prioritize your time and work to achieve your goals.

Google often sets goals that are just beyond the threshold of what seems possible, sometimes referred to as “stretch goals”. We shouldn’t make the mistake of thinking that such stretch goals should be totally unachievable. Goals should be set to be slightly above the “normal” level. For example, lets say you’re a sales person and your goal is to sell 20 “units” this month. Well with OKRs, you would set your goal and work as if you needed to sell 30 units. When you set such a high goal, you force yourself to change your mindset to focus on the things that matter most in achieving your objective and throwing away all the fluff. Now 30 units might seem like a really hard goal to achieve, but the idea is that when aiming high, even failed goals tend to result in substantial advancements. At the same time, it’s not such a high level objective that it seems daunting, like if we set our target to selling 50 units.

Another key component to OKRs is clearly communicating the nature of stretch goals and what are the thresholds for success. Google likes to set OKRs such that success means achieving 70% of the objectives, while fully reaching them is considered extraordinary performance. Thus, if you sell only 20 units even though you aimed for 30, it was still quite a successful month! If you actually do end of achieving your stretch goal, well then you’ve just massively upped your benchmark for success! Such stretch goals are the building blocks for remarkable achievements in the long term or “moonshots” since over time these step-by-step increases in your objectives and benchmarks for success compound over time.

When setting objectives, Google often starts with the organizational OKRs and aligns priorities using three to five objectives with about three key results for each objective. We can do the same thing using a top-down style! Start by setting your main goals, say 5 years down the road. I want to be the vice president of my sales/engineering/finance department. Now let’s work backwards. What do you have to do in the next 1 year to achieve that? The next 3 months? 1 month? 1 week? In this way, you can break down your goal into different objective levels. And, since you’re setting stretch goals, you just might achieve a lot more than you originally set out to!

A few more specific points about OKRs:

• Pick just three to five objectives. Having a lot more than this can spread you too thin and take away from your priorities and most important goals.
• Your objectives and key results and metrics should always be measurable. Bad: I want to become a better sales person. Good: Sell 20 more units a month than I currently sell by the end of the year.
• Use tangible, objective, and unambiguous terms. It should be obvious to an observer whether or not an objective has been achieved.
• Determine around three key results per objective. Key results express measurable milestones which, if achieved, will directly advance the objective. This will keep your time and efforts directly focused on your goals, “throwing away the fluff”.

The final big thing about OKRs, and in fact many successful goal-setting strategies and to write it down. Writing things down helps embed what you’ve written in your brain. You can also reference it later to remind you, adjust if you feel it can be further improved, and even make it public so you’re held accountable for achieving your goals. I’m including below a link to download a spread sheet where you can write down your OKRs. I hope you’ll find it useful in using Google’s secret sauce to set and achieve your goals!

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/155clpiDdP03A52NmKU0HmBp-1a10NVVHNwSFKdCf_5E/edit?usp=sharing

Conclusion

Thanks for reading! Hopefully you learned something new and useful about goal setting and Google’s secret sauce!